Ritchie House gets check for $100,000

Posted: Wednesday, January 30, 2008

By Steve Fry

Topeka's frigid, snowy weather on Tuesday was the same as 152 years ago when John Ritchie and his family were living in a cold dugout in frontier Topeka, Bill Wagnon said from inside the historic Ritchie home.

"This is Kansas weather," Wagnon said of the wind and blowing snow, adding the weather was "terrible" when abolitionists John and Mary Ritchie moved to Topeka.

Wagnon, Ritchie House Project chairman, and Carlton Scroggins, Shawnee County Historical Society president, on Tuesday received a facsimile check for $100,000 from Cox Communications for the historical society's Ritchie House Campaign.

Jay Allbaugh, vice president of government and public affairs for Cox, and Coleen Jennison, director of government affairs for Kansas, presented the check.

In recognition of the donation, the largest so far in the Ritchie House Campaign to raise $1.2 million, the education facility at the Ritchie House site will be named the Cox Communications Education Center.

So far, $720,000 has been raised to restore the site, which has the John and Mary Ritchie House at 1116 S.E. Madison, a limestone structure with a red brick front, and the adjacent house of their son, Hale Ritchie, at 1118 S.E. Madison.

The Hale Ritchie house, a two-story frame Italianate-style residence built 122 years ago, will be the visitors center, educational facility for the Ritchie site and headquarters for the Shawnee County Historical Society.

John and Mary Ritchie migrated to Topeka in 1855, built their home in 1856 and operated the house as a stop on the Underground Railroad to move escaped slaves northward.

John Ritchie was a friend of John Brown, a businessman, a town builder, an officer in the Union Army in the Civil War, a founder of a church and the donor of land for what would be Washburn University.

Too few people know about Bleeding Kansas as a prelude to the Civil War and the expansion of freedom, Wagnon said.

"It starts here in Kansas," Wagnon said, and the historical society is teaching schoolchildren about the Bleeding Kansas-Civil War link.

The $1.2 million will be used to complete the Hale Ritchie House restoration and renovation.